Tower and Town, November 2019

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Book Reviews

I keep seeing magazine articles and TV programmes about ‘turning your hobby into a business’, or ‘making money from your passion’. I’m not at all sure that it’s a good idea –  I’m a woman without hobbies, but I imagine that ‘having’ to do something to fulfil an order must be the fastest way to disenchantment. My main pastime is reading, and yes, I earn my living as a bookseller, so that does sound as though I’ve just shot my own argument down in flames. But if truth be told, there are days when I go home feeling slightly bloated with print and queasily unable to face another volume, and when customers ask ‘have you read this?’ I have to stifle a moue of indifference. Fortunately for everyone, the feeling doesn’t tend to last long, although sometimes I do have to put myself on a starvation diet of mindless TV, a sort of cerebral purging. Then I can rise refreshed from the sofa, and tackle great meaty novels and vast biographies with fat indexes.

Have you spotted where I’m going with this? Correct – I don’t seem to have read very much lately, having been tied up with the groaning board of LitFest.  My To-Be-Read and Partially-Read pile is looking healthy though – I’m looking forward to the latest  Flavia Albia novel, A Capitol Death, by Lindsey Davis, and I’m half-way through Thomas Penn’s account of the Wars of the Roses,  The Brothers York.  Edward IV, (grandfather of Henry VIII, which explains a lot about Bluff King Hal), Richard III (heroic martyr or murderous usurper – discuss) and their brother, George ‘Butt-of-Malmsey’ Clarence (inept plotter) were the brothers whose dynasty appeared unassailable, but which destroyed itself. Recommendations work both ways, so I’m going to read Turbulence by David Szalay, a volume of linked stories which Angus tells me are a gently melancholy, elegantly written, clear and honest look at human interaction.

On holiday I lay on a beach and read two thoroughly enjoyable thrillers Killing It and the sequel The Nursery by Asia Mackay, which I thought were fresh, funny and pacy. Our heroine works for a Government Secret Service Section as an assassin. She’s highly skilled, ruthless and professional, and at the beginning of the first book has just returned to work from maternity leave. Original and inventive.

Actually, look at that – I am still a reader after all. Phew.

Debby Guest